// CRACKING THE MAZE
// "Game Plug-ins and Patches as Hacker Art"
// version 1.0 July 16, 1999
#include <curators_note.h> // curators note by Anne-Marie Schleiner
#include <game_patches.h> // the game patches
#include <article_huhtamo.h> // Game Patch - the Son of Scratch? by Erkki Huhtamo
#include <article_trippi.h> // Deep Patch by Laura Trippi
#include <switch.h> // the 'Art & Games' issue of Switch
#include <credits.h> // credits and contact information
// Deep Patch
// by Laura Trippi
//
//
//
// If you've spent time working in, say, Microsoft Office, or with any piece
// of software that acts as if it knows what you want better than you do and
// does it for you, hiding every trace of code through which you might be able
// to set things right, you'll appreciate the can-do attitude embodied in game
// patches. Where a "patch" is a piece of code inserted into a program to fix a
// bug, a game patch is an alteration or add-on to a computer game, usually
// unsanctioned. Unlike ordinary software patches, game patches don't correct
// code behind the scenes, smoothing over something broken. And unlike patches
// of cloth, they don't just mend rips already made. No, the very concept of game
// patches implies and includes the act of tearing open a finished program to
// get at the underlying code.
//
// How deep into the host games do patches go? Some, like Sonya Roberts' "Female
// Skin Pack Excerpts," mapping female "skins" onto the muscled male figures of
// "Quake," skim the surface look of the game (though looks can be deceiving).
// Others, such as Jason Huddy's "Los Disneys," dig deep, appropriating the game
// engine without the content, creating a new game of the hacker's own devising.
//
// But depth can also be measured in other ways.
//
// In her notes on the patches, curator Anne-Marie Schleiner calls RTMark's
// "SimCopter Hack," a "deeper level hack than your typical patch. . . ." Depth in this
// case is not just a matter of structural relations, how far into the code and function
// of the game a patch goes. It's also a matter of process, intervening at the level of
// production. Created by the hacktivist collective RTMark in alliance with one of the
// game's programmers, this patch infiltrated the shrink-wrapped product as it was
// being made.
//
// Game patching in this sense, as a subculture, is deeply embedded in the host system,
// commercial computer games. Patches are produced to a large extent by game
// programmers, or would be programmers, and game companies have been quick to
// harness the practice of patching as a marketing tool. The guest/host dynamic here
// is complex, twisted like a mobius strip.
//
// There are patches that have no apparent host at all or adopt a host from outside the
// field of computer games, orphan hacks such as mongrel's "BlackLash" and Natalie
// Bookchin's "The Intruder." These, clearly, are straight up culture hacks whose mere
// existence underscores the viability of this subculture, its affinities with other
// parasitico-critical practices, and the robustness of its freeware economy, a
// marketplace-bazaar for codes of all kinds.
//
// In this bazaar, today's guest is tomorrow's host, as can be seen in the case of Robert
// Nideffer's "Tomb Raider I and II Patches," which Schleiner describes as "patched
// patches." That is, they are patches of the original "Nude Raider" patch, which is
// rumored to have been released as a marketing ploy by the game's publisher. Nideffer
// characterizes his patches as a Duchampian reappropriation, "hosting" one might say,
// the false "guest" that "Nude Raider" seems to have been.
//
// What's reappropriated by Nideffer is the practice and culture of game patching -- as
// a vehicle for creative and critical expression on the part of artists/programmers, as
// a means of talking back to the industry and as well as amongst themselves, and as an
// alternative gift economy flourishing in the crevices of the dominant consumerist
// system.